You're probably wondering why I'm wearing this large winter coat in the
middle of summer. You may have also noticed the smell of gunpowder
coming from my person.

You may have ALSO noticed the high-calibre explosive that just fell out
of my coat and rolled across the floor where it now rests directly
between us, begging an explanation.

I just scored, from the back of an unmarked white van, a MAJOR cache of
surplus fireworks. America's Independence Day has just come to a close
and these explodey bundles of fun needed to go somewhere - fast - no
questions asked - at bargain basement pricing.

I am about to let freedom ring in a matter which may leave you deaf
for the next several minutes.

Get ready for some EXPLOSIVE news.

CEO Time!

KAPOW! SHHRHHSHHSHRSHHRHRHHRHRH. Watch your hands!

Since the earliest of the early days of DreamHost, way back in 1997,
DreamHost has been run by our four cofounders.

They have been fourteen wonderfully successful and mostly quiet years.

During that time our four head honchos have come to realize that there
are people - talented people - in this world who have a wealth of
business knowledge at their command. And, in nearly all cases, that
knowledge comes from NOT having worked at DreamHost for their entire
professional lives.

With that in mind DreamHost spent the first half of 2011 in an
exhausting executive search for its first CEO - one voice to unite them
all!

It took countless phone interviews, in-person interviews, a few
all-hands interviews, and a company-wide vote to find our ideal
candidate.

Simon Anderson comes to us from photographer favorite Pictage.com where
he served as Chief Marketing Officer for several years. Prior to his
time at Pictage Simon had held key roles at Affinity Internet,
Authenticlick, and BiggerBoat.

All of Simon's business experience comes wrapped in an Australian accent,
a smooth skin tone, textbook musculature, and a wardrobe full of shirts
conveniently missing their top three buttons.

I'm not saying that Simon is dreamy, BUT, flowers actually turn their
blooms to face him whenever he walks by. I have seen this happen. It
is fact.

Women appreciate his unwavering confidence and rugged good looks.

Men look forward to, and treasure for days after, his heartfelt
handshakes.

Flora prefer his ambiance to the life-giving rays of the sun.

There is, quite simply, no finer specimen of humanity in the web hosting
industry - perhaps the world.

From brains to brawn, Simon Anderson is in my estimation, "the whole
package." I say this not because he is my new boss, but because the
world needs to know why DreamHost just got brilliant and dead sexy
all at once.

Keep your eyes peeled for more about and from the man himself soon after
he takes the reigns at DreamHost in mid-July.

Also, it was nice knowing you.

ZINGERERERERERER!

We'll Be At HostingCon 2011

SHHSHSHWHHWEHEOOOOO

I have a personal policy of not attending any conventions with names
that end in "con" or "camp". 9 times out of 10, the former are usually
preceded by a word like 'dragon' and the latter implies awkward social
situations. Simply put, I am too cool for either.

And yet...I am breaking my policy this year for HostingCon. The time
has come. I've been in the hosting industry for over ten years and I've
yet to attend a SINGLE trade show! This is an injustice that cannot
stand. I'm going to HostingCon this year. I may come back with rubber
Spock ears and a two-handed broadsword, but I'm going.

DreamHost cofounder Dallas Kashuba will be speaking on a panel at 2pm,
August 10th. He'll be part of a Q&A session that's sure to leave you
breathless. If I know Dallas, and I like to think I do, those 45
minutes will include instances of inappropriate touching and should end
in a shower of confetti.

If you'll be in San Diego at HostingCon 2011 (Aug 8th-10th) and would
like to meet up with anyone on the DreamHost team for business or for
pleasure, email events@dreamhost.com and we'll see what we can do!

We're Committed to OpenStack!

BEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOO CRASH

Have you heard of OpenStack yet? We think you'll be hearing a lot more
about it soon.

The OpenStack project is an effort to establish a scalable and open
software foundation for both public and private cloud hosting
environments. It's something that has the potential to put a serious
dent in Amazon AWS' market-share and has the ancillary benefit of
removing a small portion of Jeff Bezos' bizarre laughter from the
world.

"The cloud" means different things to different people - there are no
standards or consistent shared definition of what "the cloud" is, much
less what technologies are involved. It's a bit of a mess.

Standardizing on a platform and layin' down definitions benefits
everyone, and it's a vision that we feel compelled to support with our
development time and our technology.

Among our many contributions to OpenStack, one will be to integrate
Ceph, our large-scale distributed file system. We see Ceph as a
natural fit for a framework like OpenStack and we're excited to help
move the project forward.

Speaking of clouds, what's with all the smoke? Ye-GADS! MY JACKET IS
ON FIRE! QUICK, throw that glass of milk on me!

CafeCommerce Upgrades!

PHEW. Now I know why they call them sideburns.

I think I'm done with fireworks. For good. If and when my eyebrows
grow back I may reconsider, but for now I think I'll just unload this
excess inventory online with CafeCommerce!

The dev team behind CafeCommerce has been crankin' away, hard at work
over the last few weeks listening to customer feedback and rolling out
new features at a breakneck pace!

What have *I* been doing over the last few weeks? Eating spaghetti
tacos and going to bed before 10, for starters. Busy month!

I can sum up the best new CafeCommerce features in six exclamation
points:

• 4 new templates!
• Advanced users can now edit style sheets directly!
• Some Google Analytics data can now be monitored directly within the
CafeCommerce control panel!
• Products in your store can now be linked to other 'related products'
in your catalog. Users who buy cat sweaters may also be interested
in tail cozies - now just a click away!
• You can promote your products on Facebook, Twitter, and more with new
social media sharing buttons!
• Integration with Google Product Search! (shopping.google.com)

Adding CafeCommerce to your DreamHost account (at a mere $21.05 per
month) entitles you not only to regular updates and feature additions
like those above, but also gets you an online store with unlimited
inventory, unlimited bandwidth, no setup fees, and no transaction fees.

If you haven't checked it out yet, hop on over to your DreamHost web
panel to sign up for a two week free trial of CafeCommerce!

Through DreamHost Apps we provide absolutely free hosting for a handful
of popular web apps - WordPress, Drupal, and a few others too.

What's the catch? There are some limitations...like um, well, no
technical support. That's kind of a biggie. Also, no FTP access. No
shell access. No free domain registration. No ads on your site.
That last one is actually a positive.

But really, if all you want is web-based access to a web-based
application, who needs that junk anyway!

DreamHost Apps users do have the option to upgrade quickly and easily
to a paid hosting plan with DreamHost to gain the same full suite of
features and benefits that you, as a paying customer, have come to
expect.

Upgrading to paid hosting also entitles them to receive this newsletter,
which may be the reason why so few actually do...

The winner in the OVERALL, STRUCTURE, and ORIGINALITY categories is:
Impeccable Petunia
"Follow Petunia the backyard hen, in a weekly web-series, through a
hazardous world as she discovers hidden talents, meets a mischievous
cat named Macy, and encounters all things feathered and furious."